Mike Rugnetta: Friends, hello, and welcome to Never Post, a
podcast for and about the Internet. I'm your host, Mike
Rugnetta. This intro was written on Tuesday, 08/12/2025 at
09:10AM eastern, and we have an harmonious show for you today.
Contributing producer Toby Martin takes a deeper look at
why and how his online ads have changed throughout his
transition. Then in our second ever edition of terms and
conditions, I talk in detail about RSS, what it is, how it
works, and why it's having a moment.
For that, I chat with Justin Jackson, cofounder of podcast
host transistor.fm and member of the podcast standards project
about the future of RSS and also Internet instruments. But right
now, we're gonna take a quick break. You're gonna listen to
some ads unless you're on the member feed. And when we return,
we're gonna talk about a few of the things that have happened
since the last time you heard from us. Johnny's in the
basement mixing up the five stories for you this week.
Reddit will block the Internet Archive's wayback machine from
scraping a majority of the site. This, the social media platform
states, is because they've caught AI companies scraping the
archive to build datasets for training. Speaking to The Verge,
Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt says, until they're
able to defend their site and comply with platform policies, e
g respecting user privacy regarding deleting removed
content, we're limiting some of their access to Reddit data to
protect Redditors, end quote. Notably, in the last year,
Reddit has partnered with both OpenAI and Google. The Google
partnership brought in $60,000,000 for Reddit and The
Verge reports that it was explicitly to quote, give Google
more efficient ways to train models.
No dollar amount was made public concerning the OpenAI
partnership with both companies touting AI powered features
on-site for Reddit and no explicit mention of training
data was made at the time either. Some speculate that deal
brought in $70,000,000 for Reddit. Wikipedia or more
specifically the Wikimedia Foundation has lost its suit in
a UK high court wherein it claimed that the identity
verification required by the UK government would be both
unnecessary and damaging to the site where a large portion of
editors desire anonymity for reasons we discussed with
Stephen Harrison in Neverpost episode 29 fucking around and
finding out. The UK's new online safety act was passed to address
the proliferation of harmful content online, but has faced
much criticism for being both harsh and draconian. At question
here is if Wikipedia should be classified as a category one
site, a determination based upon its user base size and features.
Wikimedia foundation says no, but The UK's office of
communication may say yes, now that a judge has ruled Wikipedia
is not de facto exempt. All this while Wikipedia also fights
slop. The Washington Post reports that editors are
battling an on onslaught of AI generated nonsense. Daniel Wu
writes quote, suspicious edits and even entirely new articles
with errors, made up citations and other hallmarks of AI
generated writing keep popping up on the free online
encyclopedia. Deep in Wikipedia's message boards and
edit logs, the site's stewards are toiling for long hours to
find them and stamp them out, end quote.
A study last October, Wu continues, estimates some 5% of
entries contain AI generated text. Illinois becomes the first
state in The US to ban AI therapists. Governor Pritzker
signed the bill into law on August 5, which says that only
licensed therapists can provide counseling and that chatbots are
not to assume the role of mental health professionals in any way.
The eight page law reads in part quote, an individual corporation
or entity may not provide advertise or otherwise offer
therapy or psychotherapy services including through the
use of internet based artificial intelligence to the public in
this state unless the therapy or psychotherapy services are
conducted by an individual who is a licensed professional, end
quote. The law also puts limits on a licensed professional's use
of AI as a supplementary tool in treatment.
And finally, this year alone, 22 states have enacted mobile phone
bans in all or part of the k through 12 range of their public
schools. The laws range in severity from suggestions that
schools do something about access to devices to outright
bans in states like New York, Vermont, Texas, and Florida.
Ballotpedia points out there's a variance amongst states
concerning if phones are allowed during medical emergencies,
break periods, and so on. Ballotpedia also reports that
quote, of the 26 total states with laws banning or limiting
cell phone use, 17 have republican trifectas, six have
divided governments, and three have democratic trifectas. A
trifecta here meaning a party that controls all three branches
of state government.
One, two, three. In show news, I was on episode 51 of the
Tasteland podcast talking about the Internet, making never post
hentai, the attention economy, and the Internet media
environment as I've seen it over the last couple decades and
more. I had a really great time chatting with Francis and Daisy,
so please go check that out. Tasteland wherever you get your
podcasts, and we'll also throw a link in the description. And we,
in case you haven't heard, are in the midst of a member drive.
That's right, folks. We are driving members crazy, reminding
them that now is the time to support Neverpost to help us get
financially sustainable by the start of next year, which is a
little bit away. But you know what's very soon? The member
drive stream week, which is next week, August. If you missed it
in George's newsletter, which lots of updates go in there, so
please make sure you're subscribed.
There is a whole schedule waiting for you with a Monday
morning eastern kickoff. I hope you'll join us then and then at
various points throughout the week for chitchats, q and a's,
game streams, a tour of Georgia's closet, special
guests, giveaways, and more. Please check the newsletter or
go to neverpoe.st for the schedule next week. Member drive
stream week. Okay.
Next, Toby on the Internet doing gender at you, then RSS. But
first, in our interstitials this week, three Internet
instruments, two of which are entrants in the twenty twenty
five tiny awards, which are amazing and we've put a link to
that in the description. Please go check it out. In our
interstitials, we have Maximo Neely Cohen's 10,000 Drum
Machines, Rafael Bastides Nest, and ErrorZero's Three zero three
Gen. Links to all of these in the show notes.
Hans Buetow: Okay. Here we go. 10kdrummachines.com.
10kdrummachines.com. Oh, list of drum machines.
Here we go. Here we go. What do I want? Let's do Nights Tour
Drum Sequencer. Number nine.
It's a chess board. It's a chess board. Okay. Knight two is
snare. How I play?
It's playing chess. Okay. Let's start with White Album Noise
Machine. Cool. Cool.
Cool. So we got four tracks to let's just click some random
patterns here. Let's do a random sequence, and let's do the bpm
at a 190. Just for just a 180. 180 is as high as it goes.
Alright. Here we go. Alright. Let's refresh the sounds.
Alright.
Let's break it down a little bit slower. Let's do let's do it in
half. Let's do 90.
Georgia Hampton: Hello, everybody. It's producer
Georgia. I'm just jumping in here because I am so stoked
about the segment that you are about to listen to. Eagle eared
listeners might remember this pitch from our April mailbag,
where listener of the show Toby Martin sent in a voicemail about
this strange experience he's had online. I'm not giving anything
away.
Since then, Toby and I, along with additional support from
Hans, have been working together to shape that pitch into what
you're about to listen to. I am so so excited for you to hear
this. I'll let Toby take it from here.
Toby Martin: I wanna paint a picture for you. I'm 22 years
old. It's been three weeks since my top surgery, and all I can
bring myself to do is lay in bed on my laptop. I'm on the
subreddit r slash what is this rock looking at an impressive
sedimentary rock comprised of a bunch of crinoid fossils from
Lake Michigan. When I see this jarring ad in the middle of my
screen.
Clip: Most men don't need more testosterone. They need more h g
h.
Toby Martin: I am no stranger to ads on the internet, but as a
trans man, it felt weirdly timely to be getting served
alpha male ads on Reddit after my top surgery. This wasn't
gender euphoria. It was more like a type of gender euphoria,
spelled with an e w. This ad represented a type of macho man
that icked me out, the type of guy I would steer clear from at
a bar. I couldn't figure out why I got this ad in the first
place, so I started to obsess over my targeted content to see
if I might be able to get more of the same.
And I did. A majority of my content was geared at cis
straight men. I was being advertised shitty supplements,
hair loss treatments, and my personal favorite, erectile
dysfunction cure alls. These guys were everywhere. When did
my ads become this hyper masculine, and what did I change
to make that happen?
In pursuit to answer these questions and the many more that
would come up along the way, I started talking to my fellow
trans folks. I wrote out a message saying, has anyone
noticed a change in their targeted ads or content as they
transitioned? I am mainly trying to vibe check if I'm an isolated
experience or not because for me, it's a night and day
difference on some platforms. I pressed send and waited
anxiously for a response. Turns out, yes.
A lot of folks had things to say. I got permission to share
these messages, but to protect everyone's privacy, you'll be
hearing from some fantastic trans writers and artists to
read these messages on their behalf.
Guest Reader: Yes. My ads shifted over time. And it was
pretty clear what kind of sites integrate with Facebook because
my ads would change almost immediately after visiting
certain sites, like for clothing or post op care, etcetera.
Facebook also likes to show me transition before and afters,
which are really annoying, and I always hide those to try to get
it to stop. And it also likes to show me a lot of lesbian
content.
Toby Martin: This made total sense to me because, I mean, I
had a very similar experience through my transition. After I
bought some fleece lined sweatpants and a body pillow for
my top surgery recovery, my ads responded very quickly.
Suddenly, I got a ton more ads trying to sell me scar tape or
wedge pillows. But stuff like recovery kits and transition
before and after ads wasn't really my focus for the segment.
I was especially interested in how much of my own targeted
content was advertising a certain kind of gender.
More specifically, your prototypical manosphere cis het
man. Where did he come from? And I think I remember. It was my
freshman year of college. At the time, I still presented as a
very femme version of myself.
I sold my hair in wet set curlers. I dressed in skirts and
wore a full face of makeup. A lot of my ads reflected this. I
got ads for Benefit Cosmetics, Unique Vintage, and a lot of
women's skincare brands. These ads were hyper feminine,
presenting me with a version of womanhood that was smooth and
perfectly made up with foundation and eyeshadow.
I was used to seeing ads like this, of the hyperfem variety.
But one day in my engineering class, I got fed something very,
very different. I remember I was working on this three d model
with some YouTube videos playing in the background. I wasn't
really paying much attention to the video until this ad for the
US army started playing. I'd never been delivered a military
ad before.
It was the exact opposite of what I was used to seeing. No
more soft focus. No more makeup. Instead, I saw a buff soldier
piloting a drone with the caption
Clip: Join the team that makes a difference.
Toby Martin: I felt conflicted. I didn't care about the US
military or drones, but it made me feel like something had
shifted. Remember, I saw this ad when I was in my engineering
class where I was one of two girls in the 23 person class.
And something about being in this very masked place changed
the way my ads saw me. I wanted to talk to someone who could
help me understand this.
Adam Aleksic: Hi. My name is Adam Aleksek. I'm a linguist and
content creator posting videos as the etymology nerd to an
audience of over 3,000,000, and I just finished writing the
book, How Social Media is Transforming the Future of
Language, which is now available for order.
Toby Martin: I wanted Adam's help in making sense of how
algorithms target content to users, specifically when it
comes to gender. He explained to me that in order to better
understand the algorithms, we have to understand how we use
them and how it makes a profile of us.
Adam Aleksic: It comes out of everything you've ever liked,
commented on, everything you've ever posted, the way your thumb
rests on your screen, your basic demographic information, the the
activity you have on other apps that they can track, whether
your phone's on the same WiFi network as another phone that's
recently engaged in the kind of content. So even if you're not
you haven't looked up Coquette video in your life and you just
had a conversation with the Kochette person, your phone's
not actually listening to you, but they they might know that
you were in the same room as this person because you're on
the same WiFi network. So they they build through a lot of
these things. Oftentimes, they yeah. Through cross app
tracking, they can tell from your search history and all
that's built into your user profile and ends up influencing
what videos get recommended to you.
Toby Martin: The idea that my real life interactions affect my
targeted content can feel nice. When my friend sends me a TikTok
I've already seen or sends me a post about a TV show I talked
about, I feel more connected to them. Our algorithms overlap,
which makes it feel like we have a mutual common language. When I
started learning to play piano, my algorithm started sending me
ads for sheet music. Soon, I was getting recommended videos about
music theory or banner ads for free teaching apps and top 10
best keyboards for beginners.
Piano was just a hobby for me, but my algorithm was acting like
piano was the only thing I cared about. For a month, all I saw
was piano content. So sure, I didn't click on every keyboard
ad I saw, but it did feel nice that my feed was reflecting
something about me that was true, even if it was a little
exaggerated. Getting that hyper masculine military ad wasn't
exactly the kind of masculinity I identified with, but it also
felt kind of affirming. I wasn't going to click on the ad.
I didn't want to join the army, but it did kind of make me feel
like I was one of the guys. So all my data and my search
history and what I buy gets compiled together, and then I've
got my gender assigned at algorithm. But it's definitely
not perfect.
Guest Reader: I started getting targeted binder ads after I got
top surgery. I get a lot of ads for like alternative women's
underwear companies that target mostly gender nonconfirming
queer women. I think the algo thinks I'm a tomboy. I'm a trans
man.
Toby Martin: The algorithm doesn't seem to be good at
nuance when it comes to gender. Getting top surgery means you
don't need binders anymore. And being a trans man could get
garbled up by the algorithm and turned into some vague idea of
being a tomboy. It feels less like my gender is what defines
my algorithm and more like what I'm buying. Like, okay.
Fantastic. So I bought a suit, looked up hockey stats, and
calculated my macros. Now the algorithm sees me as a man TM.
But once I got stamped with the you're a dude label by my feed,
I noticed that the algorithmic understanding of manhood was
really specific. Maybe I'd start with getting ads for cargo
shorts and boxer briefs, but it wouldn't take long before I'd
start seeing sports betting ads, then an ad for Drew Peterson's
new book, and suddenly I'm in a different world, down the rabbit
hole of Red Pills and Mig Tau bros.
And I'm not alone in this experience.
Guest Reader: I've been openly trans for six years now, and
these are the main ads that get pushed to me now with me being
more openly manly. Charlie Kirk, Turning Point USA, Super Sexy
Gacha Games, Gambling, the occasional penis enlargement
product. I cannot stress the uptick in right wing slash MAGA
content that keeps being pushed regardless of me blocking or
saying I don't want these specific ads.
Toby Martin: The algorithm is optimizing for this one type of
guy. A guy who would see military ads and think, that
could be me. I could make a difference. But that wasn't me,
and it's never going to be me. But for some reason, I couldn't
escape this super bro who's haunting my ads.
I asked Adam about this, and he explained that a part of this
has to do with the way that algorithms feed certain kinds of
content out to different groups of people.
Adam Aleksic: In the traditional model of communication and
linguistics, I talk to you, I'm the encoder, you get my message,
you decode it. Now if I'm talking to you as a social media
influencer, I am encoding a message. The algorithm decodes
the message, encodes a new message, and then sends it out,
and then you decode it. So there's an extra layer there.
And when I say the algorithm, like, encodes a new message, it
may send it to an unintended audience.
I may want my video to reach a certain demographic of people,
and the algorithm might reassign it.
Toby Martin: So maybe someone like Jordan Peterson gets the
attention of a certain kind of guy, like a huge community full
of that one kind of dude. That content goes to the top of the
list to advertise to men online just because it's really popular
among men. But it's still a traditional version of
masculinity, one I certainly don't ascribe to. And isn't my
algorithm supposed to get to know me specifically? Why does
it insist on pushing out this one version of hypermasculinity?
Adam Aleksic: We can't avoid talking about algorithmic bias
here, which naturally amplifies social bias. Algorithms tend to
compound and amplify what natural human social behaviors
are. Unfortunately, humans tend to trust more or want to view
more videos from people who are in the gender binary, like, kind
of stereotype, like, presentation. So algorithms
reflexively are going to reinforce that, and more
heteronormative kind of perspectives are gonna be pushed
because that's what's going viral.
Toby Martin: The manosphere just has a huge online presence.
There's a lot of money to be made there. So from an
algorithmic perspective, it's a no brainer. If you're a dude on
the Internet, you're gonna get these kinds of ads. Look up
cargo shorts one time and bam, here comes Jordan Peterson.
Adam Aleksic: There is a really interesting sort of algorithmic
performativity as well, where an influencer isn't just performing
for their audience, they're performing for what they think
is gonna go viral.
Toby Martin: So in this case, ends up happening is this
compounding situation where certain kinds of content go
viral, get a lot of algorithmic attention, and then the people
making that content see how popular their stuff is, and they
make more of it. The cycle keeps going and going, and that
hypermasculine content keeps getting pushed out to more and
more people, even people like me who are very much not the
intended audience for it. This version of manhood isn't
something I want for myself. It feels like hearing a dissonant
chord, an interpretation of gender that feels totally off
the mark to what I actually feel about myself. But those super
masculine ads also came to me at a time where I was in the middle
of figuring myself out, where my own understanding of how I felt
about manhood was developing.
And like I said before, at first, it felt kind of nice to
be treated like a guy by the algorithm, even if it wasn't the
right kind of guy. When I first got that macho military ad, I
was still presenting as a woman in the real world. And as I
began coming out to my friends and exploring my trans identity
through online channels, that wasn't always true IRL. I was
constantly bargaining with my own identity. Maybe I could chop
my hair off into a more androgynous cut or wear more
pants, less dresses, but it was a process.
And in a way, my ads reflected this period where I was changing
myself constantly for myself and others. Online, I spent a lot of
time trying to figure out what being a man looked like for me.
Maybe I'm a cargo shorts guy or an Overwatch guy, and its
imperfect way, my algorithm served as another way to try
stuff on. It was like it was asking me, do you want to become
a Manosphere guy? Do you
Georgia Hampton: wanna listen to Joe Rogan?
Toby Martin: When I first got those kind of gendered ads, they
really freaked me out because, no, I don't wanna be that kind
of guy. I never have been that kind of guy. But in the process
of working on this segment, I've started to look at it another
way. The algorithm was performing with me as I started
to unravel who I was.
Adam Aleksic: Well, I mean, all identity is performance. Right?
That's historically always been true. It depending on our
audience, we are constantly embodying a role or an idea of,
like, who we are supposed to be. And that's the thing.
Even without the algorithms even without the algorithms, if a
label is out there, it'll always affect our identity because now
we know once we know it's there, we're either going to perform
toward it or we're gonna perform against it.
Toby Martin: As I continue living as a man and learning
what that looks like for me, the grip the ads have on me has
loosened. I'm not performing for my ad profile. I don't need it
anymore. The gendered algorithm is simple and uncomplicated. It
has no depth, and it doesn't even know what a man is.
It only knows that a lot of guys click on ads for male growth
hormone. I'm breaking up with my gender assigned algorithm
because being transgender, or for God's sakes, human, can't be
easily partitioned away. I'm a man, and I get to decide what
that means for me. To me, manhood looks like wearing green
cargo shorts and watching hockey. It looks like a lot of
things, but I get to choose.
Thank you to Adam Alexic for sitting down to chat with me.
Check out his book AlgoSpeak wherever you buy books. And
thank you to my friends for offering their voices to read
the quotes folks sent in, and everyone who submitted their
experiences with the algorithm and gendered ads.
Mike Rugnetta: In this, our second ever terms and conditions
segment, where we explain things that you, our dear listeners,
maybe never got around to understanding and are now too
afraid to ask or too busy to learn on your own, I'm gonna
tackle your most requested topic by far, RSS. That's right. The
very technology that you used to get this and probably every
other podcast that you listen to. The technology that allowed
the once mighty Google reader to thrive. The technology that
launched and arguably sustained countless blogs in the early two
thousands in which in the era of the platform internet is
currently having a bit of a resurgence.
You have maybe read about RSS recently. For instance, in April
2024, Alex Sujon Laughlin published, if you love podcasts,
dump Spotify on Defector, in which she pits the walled in
audio platform giant against the open RSS standard. This
February, it's FOSS News published, why I still love and
use RSS feeds in 2025. Just last month, Molly White published a
citation needed newsletter titled curate your own newspaper
with RSS And the subtitle, escape newsletter inbox chaos
and algorithmic surveillance by building your own and
shitification proof newspaper from writers you already read.
In January, Jason Snell at long running Apple news blog
6colors.com published the post reading newsletters via RSS
reader is still great.
And in April 2024, Scott Gilbertson at Wired published
the best RSS feed readers for streamlining the internet with
the subtitle, the internet is a mess. Ignore the algorithm and
distill the web down to the things you already care about.
Reddit, blue sky, x are all awash with love posts to RSS, so
we're gonna talk about it. What RSS is in hopefully not too
excruciating technological detail, but some technological
detail. How the conditions of its development made it what it
is, a standard which has not really changed in twenty plus
years, and will chart the aforementioned down and then
upswing in interest, which would seem at first glance to be the
inverse of an up and then downswing in public sentiment
regarding the social internet.
Probably just a coincidence. So what is RSS? RSS is a
standardized open format web feed based on XML. We're gonna
go through each of those things. A web feed isn't normally
something you interact with directly.
It's a document made by one service, say, a podcast host,
and decoded by another service, say, your pod catcher. One
service makes and maintains the feed based on the things that
you publish, and then the other pulls information from it in
order to serve it in a useful format, like, say, sound files
to listen to and information about those sound files. This
means that RSS is what is called machine readable, not human
readable. I mean, you could read it, but no one would expect you
to. And by simply reading it, you don't benefit from its
existence because your brain can't download audio files or
metadata.
And if it can, please call the show. Now there are a bunch of
web feed formats. JSON feed, Atom, and RSS are the most
common. Both RSS and Atom, which is, like, sort of based on RSS,
kind of, are written in what's called XML. XML is a markup
language, sort of similar to HTML, which is used to make web
pages, but XML can make, kind of whatever you want.
It has many many uses. In fact, it stands for extensible markup
language. So what is a markup language? A markup language
generally, envelops or enrobes. It goes around other pieces of
information.
Usually, though not always, plain text and media or links to
media. So images, video, audio. It goes around those things and
it helps to organize and sometimes display them, and that
organization is done within a hierarchy of nodes. So we're
gonna talk about this practically because I think it's
gonna be a bit easier to understand than talking about it
abstractly. So I know I just told you not to do this, but if
you were to download and open and then read the RSS file for
this podcast for Never Post, which you could do, in any,
plain text reader.
So like, you know, notepad should do it, by going to
neverpo.st and then in the middle of the page, you'll see
the orange RSS icon that says listen via RSS. Click on that or
right click on it and just save the file that pops up and then
open it. Scroll down a little bit to see the entry for this
episode. You'd see open angle bracket item, the word item I t
e m, closed angle bracket, which for simplicity I'm just gonna
call those brackets from now on. This marks the beginning of a
node.
The word item is defined by the RSS standard and it means
everything that follows until this node is closed describes
one post in the feed. Then you'll see open bracket, title,
close bracket. Title also defined by the RSS standard
means everything in this node is the title of the post. Then it
will say the title of this episode in plain text. I don't
know what that title is at the time of recording, but let's say
it's a feed me Seymour.
That would go right here followed by open bracket forward
slash title closed bracket. The addition of the slash means that
this is a closing tag. This node is done. Everything before this
was the title. Everything after this is something else.
Next up is open bracket, pub date, close bracket. Everything
in this node is the date and time that this item, this
episode was published. So it's gonna be Wednesday, 08/13/2025
and then whatever time we end up publishing in UTC. Then open
bracket forward slash pub date close bracket. This is a closing
tag which means as we already know, this node is done.
Everything before this closing tag was the pub date. Everything
after this is something else and so on and so forth for
everything useful that you would want in a feed with many node
names defined by the RSS standard. These are things like
description and summary, enclosure which in a podcast RSS
is the link to the actual audio file and more including a bunch
of nodes that begin iTunes, which is maybe gonna seem kind
of strange. This is because Apple as arguably the most
powerful player in the podcast space has helped to establish a
bunch of conventions, but they've added those conventions
on top of the RSS standard using something that's called
namespace. We're gonna talk more about that later.
That's a sort of deep technical detail that you don't really
need to know yet or perhaps ever. All of these nodes are
included inside each item node which is then closed with a open
bracket forward slash item closed bracket tag. Meaning, at
that point, we're done talking about this item, this episode
and we're ready to move on either to the next or the end of
the feed. The whole thing is kinda like a train. The engine
at the front says, here comes an episode.
And then each car is filled with specific information about the
episode loaded by the service that publishes it. So you get
the description car, then you get the runtime car, then the
post body text car. The Internet is the track that moves this
information from publisher to reader or pod catcher where
everything is then unloaded and organized according to that
station's specific operations. Now in order to work right, an
RSS feed, which remember is really just a document listing
things that have been published elsewhere, has to adhere to two
standards. Syntactically, an RSS feed has to contain parsable
XML.
Tags need to be opened and closed correctly, nested
properly, etcetera, etcetera. And it also has to follow the
RSS standard. Use the right node names, contain the required
nodes, and so on. This is what we mean when we say that RSS is
standardized, but confusingly, there are a couple different RSS
standards. The most common requires only three pieces of
info.
A title for the feed, so for example, never post, a home page
URL, so neverpoe.st, and a description, a podcast for and
about the Internet hosted by Mike Rugnetta. That's it. An RSS
feed doesn't need items to be valid. It can be empty. This is
how you can subscribe to a newsletter, say, or a blog
before it has any posts.
Podcasts work a little differently, but that's a
convention, not a requirement. And all of this is incidentally
what makes RSS open. You can just go to where the standard is
kept and see in plain text, human readable, what's required.
And then you can go and implement that yourself. You
don't need to pay a fee.
You don't need to ask anyone permission, not the folks who
publish the standard nor the folks who made it. But okay.
Wait. This may make you wonder, who are those people? Who
decided that this works this way?
Who standardized this standard? Well, that's something of a long
story, but we're gonna cover the broad strokes of it because
understanding how RSS was made can help us understand why it
feels like something of an antidote to the impersonal
algorithms heavy social internet. In the introduction of
the 1995 O'Reilly book Developing Feeds with RSS and
Adam, Ben Hammersley begins like this. It's an extended quote,
but it's good, so I'm gonna read the whole thing. In the
developers bars of the world, those dark sordid places filled
with grizzled coders and their clans, a special corner is
always reserved for the developers of content
syndication standards.
There, weeping into their beer, you'll find the veterans of a
long and difficult process. The standards you will read about in
this book were not born fresh and innocent of a streamlined
process overseen by the wise and good. Rather, the following
chapters have been dragged into the world and tempered through
brawls, knife fights, and the occasional riot. Incredible. I
mean, obviously tongue in cheek, but all of this melodrama for
making a piece of tech that collects posts in a feed so they
can be syndicated elsewhere.
Why? Why so much torment and strife and conflict and pain?
Well, I mean, are nerds that we're talking about, and
development on what would become RSS began in 1995. So these are
early Internet nerds, or I guess early modern Internet nerds.
Maybe there was a lot of ego involved.
I mean, probably there was, but there was also a lot of
principle at work. The developers of RSS were trying
generally, I think, to follow the steps of Tim Berners Lee and
the development of what is arguably the Internet's base
technology, the hyperlink. The development of something so open
and yet at the same time so narrow isn't easy, especially
when you don't know exactly how it will be used yet. So that
quote is pointing us even further back to Apple earlier in
the mid nineties and a product called hot sauce developed by
Ramanathan g Guha that was intended to allow users to
browse documents like websites, for instance, in three d space.
Yes.
Really. Steve Jobs mothballed that project in 1997 when he
returned to Apple, and Guha went to Netscape. And what followed
was a flurry of activity over about two or three years between
Apple, Netscape, Microsoft, and independent developers who saw
the promise of these nascent syndication technologies for
bloggers. This would have been in the depths of the browser
wars, if that's meaningful to anyone. Though if it's
meaningful to you, you probably already know this history.
Dan Libby of Netscape authored what would become the first RSS
standard based upon a string of technology leading all the way
back to hot sauce. But even though this was a momentous
occasion, some folks were frustrated, and they saw this
implementation as lacking. It could syndicate headlines, a
list of links, basically, but not site content. So Dan Weiner
of the software development company Userland and later and
currently scripting.com would follow this first implementation
of RSS with an update to his own scripting news feed format. Dan
Weiner took a bunch of the stuff that was implemented in this
first RSS standard, and he added the ability to syndicate whole
paragraphs of content.
This edition was really meaningful, and so then the next
version of RSS 0.91 incorporated those features. This back and
forth exemplifies a lot about what's great and messy about RSS
specifically and open standards generally. We talked about this
and all things RSS with Justin Jackson, cofounder of Transistor
dot FM, the host we use for Never Post's member feed, but
Justin is also a member of the Podcast Standards Project. This
is what he had to say about the trade offs involved when
building something that's open.
Justin Jackson: The benefit of having a centralized platform is
you can just have a CEO decide, we're gonna do this, and that's
what we're doing. And with anything in the open protocol
world, you have to create alignment. You have to do all of
this groundwork with human beings, all this coordination
work.
Mike Rugnetta: A standard like RSS is not a piece of software
that's made and then distributed. It's more just like
a way of doing things that people can adopt or not. The
standard is only really useful if the folks who use it, who
bake it into their software, agree and coordinate with one
another and align on when and where and how everything is
implemented. And I don't know if you've noticed this, but getting
people to agree to work together, especially in tech, is
not easy. So this is where we get into the brawls and the
knife fights and the riots.
After Dan and Dave agree on RSS 0.91, a rift develops over
effectively how extensible RSS should be. Should it do a small
number of very specific things or should it do whatever people
want it to as long as it follows a broad standard? The second
approach relies on something called namespace. Effectively
saying, if you want to add new nodes beyond the standard
assortment that's already there, that's fine, but you have to put
your name in front of it. Like say, iTunes.
Hey, you already know how that works. Nice. One group says no
to namespaces. It's gonna make things too complicated if you
can stack whatever you want on top of the standard. And the
other group says, yes.
It's basically needed to make RSS useful and to give it
longevity so people can expand on it. For those of you that
know portions of this history, this is also around the time
that a 14 year old Aaron Swartz gets involved with RSS. The
solution ends up being, as we've mentioned, two standards which
in recent years really have drifted closer and closer to one
another in their feature set. But RSS two point o, the
copyright for which was assigned to Harvard's Berkman Klein
Center for Internet Law is by far the most implemented with
over 70% of RSS feeds aligning to its standard which allows
namespaces. This standard was finally solidified in 02/2003.
We asked Justin, why hasn't RSS changed since then? Aren't there
technical limitations inherent to a standard as old as this
one?
Justin Jackson: The original spec is probably not going to be
changed much, because it doesn't really need to. Inside
podcasting, we've continued to innovate on top of it. And that
was one of the beautiful things about it. I would argue there's
actually no technical limitations. I think you could
anything that you want to build on top of RSS, you can.
Even things that people have traditionally said don't work
with RSS. Things like people will say, well, it's a typically
one way. Right? I publish a blog post, or I publish a podcast
episode. You refresh your app, and it, you know, picks up the
new episode, and you pull it down to your RSS feed reader or
your podcast app.
But there's no reason we couldn't add two way
communication to that. One one example of this is Transistor
uses something called the social interact tag, which is this new
podcasting two point o tag. And it allowed us to build on top of
Blue Sky and the AT protocol. It allows people to add comments to
podcast episodes. And these comments can be shared across
networks.
They can work in some ways, they're agnostic. They don't
need a particular social network or platform. And so, you know,
that that was a fairly simple implementation on top of RSS. So
it's all possible.
Mike Rugnetta: So then why isn't RSS constantly evolving? Adding
video to podcast episodes or comments directly in the feed?
Based upon what we've said already, you can probably guess
the answer.
Justin Jackson: I think everything has just come down to
coordination. You have to coordinate between three
different groups, really. You have to coordinate between the
podcast hosting companies, which are largely generating the RSS
feeds and XML. You have to coordinate between the apps, and
not just like independent apps, like Overcast or Podcast Guru,
but bigger apps like Apple Podcasts. And then you have to
coordinate between with creators.
And creating alignment between those three groups is a
challenge. What do creators actually want? There's figuring
out how are we going to coordinate on between all these
groups? How can we create alignment when everyone's
motivated by something different?
Mike Rugnetta: Now, as complicated and maybe as
torporous as this process is, I do think it really is the
beating heart of why RSS has persisted for as long as it has
and is having something of a moment right now as we perhaps
crest and then begin to descend the other side of the mountain
that is the era of the social Internet. Ten to twelve years
ago, RSS was considered outdated, if not dead. For Vice,
in 2019, Sinclair Target writes of that era, people never felt
comfortable using RSS. It hadn't really been designed as a
consumer facing technology and involved too many hurdles.
People jumped ship as soon as something better came along.
Target's not wrong. It's not easy for people to make RSS
feeds from whatever they happen upon. The hoi polloi benefits
from their existence as long as the folks doing the publishing,
making the podcasts, the blogs, the news stories, the weather
updates, photographs, videos, whatever else might reasonably
be found in a feed, are willing to put the effort into
syndicating those things via an RSS feed, which has its own set
of technological requirements and restrictions. And also
incidentally tends to keep people off of the publishing
site and therefore not looking at ads. Google Reader, the
storied RSS aggregator was shut down on 07/01/2013, citing a
slow and steady dwindling of its user base.
The press release that announced the shuttering read, quote,
while Google reader has a passionate user base, the
product has not seen the growth or engagement that we had hoped
for. We would like to refocus our efforts on more popular
products that our users currently enjoy. The something
better that Target hints at? Social media. Twitter,
specifically.
The cynical amongst us may also think that Google killed Reader
in the hopes of boosting adoption of Google plus.
Remember Google plus? No one else does either. We might
consider 2013 ish the nadir of RSS's history to date, after
which it seems there's been a slow and similarly steady
increase in interest around what the format provides. It's
possible even that we've yet to see the zenith of RSS's
popularity.
Justin Jackson: If there's gonna be a resurgence of RSS used for
other things, like video, like articles, like social media
posts, I think the problem to solve there is with app
developers. How are we going to harness this fire hose and make
it make it helpful, useful.
Mike Rugnetta: RSS is the way that it is and operates the way
that it does and is supported in the ways that it is because
disparate far flung groups of people decided actively that it
should be that way, and that sort of agency is then passed on
to the people who use it for better and worse. RSS isn't an
algorithm. It does no curation. It doesn't collect information
about you nor require a subscription fee. It allows you
simply to know when your stories are on, which means to Justin's
point, if you're not careful or if you want to, you can very
easily overwhelm yourself with RSS.
But if implemented and used in a certain way, it can also be an
antidote to the overwhelm that we experience elsewhere on the
Internet.
Justin Jackson: I don't think it's mainstream, but there could
be a world where Gen Z and maybe other generations as well just
say, you know what? I'm kind of done with this centralized
commercial ad driven Internet that's just designed to give me
brain rot, and designed to addict me. And I want something
that's more mindful. And I think we already saw this with email.
You know, there's this resurgence of email newsletters.
So much of what made culture great in the sixties and
seventies and eighties and nineties was that you had to
work for it. There was friction. And I think maybe our culture is
starting to wake up to this idea that we need a bit more
friction. We need a little bit more mess. We need not
everything to just be perfect, but, you know, maybe it's worth
working to find a podcast you really like, even though it's
not easy.
Maybe it's worth having an episode of Radiotopia show up in
your feed and you're like, that sounds boring. But then it auto
plays when you're on a long road trip, and you're like, actually,
that was really great. I'm glad I'm glad I didn't just swipe
away from that after listening. You know, I that is my hope is
that if anything, I think we're just gonna go back to some of
the old ways of doing things because we just realize we need
it.
Mike Rugnetta: Thank you so much to Justin for chatting with us.
You can find Justin on Blue Sky at Justin Jackson dot c a. And
if you are so inclined, can host your podcast at transistor.fm.
They did not pay us to say that we got Justin on this segment
because he is an expert, but we also just happen to be big fans
of transistor. I hope this terms and conditions was instructive.
Are there things about the Internet that you want us to
explain to you because you're not going to go do the research
yourself? Listen. I get it. Send us an email. Send us a voice
memo or a voice mail.
Let us know what you wanna know about and who knows, maybe it
will be the next terms and conditions segment. That is the
show we have for you this week. We're gonna be back here on the
main feed on Wednesday, August 27, but we will be on Twitch all
next week. Join us at twitch.tv/the never post. Check
the newsletter and the website for a schedule.
I got some notes recently that I should not joke about not
knowing what it is we do on the show and that in addition to
being not true, it's also just kind of an irritating millennial
move to be like, oh, we're just a small bean. I don't know what
we're doing show. So Here's the facts. Never post is a media and
technology criticism in theory podcast which takes the position
that for better and worse, one of the best ways to understand
contemporary western society is through an understanding of the
internet and how our interactions with it shape our
outlooks, our relationships, our sense of what's happening, and
what's possible. My friend George said the show is NPR for
the terminally online.
Does that make Hans or Terry Gross? Does Georgia Arnetta Ulla
be? Oh, no. Am I the Ira Glass become a member? At neverpo.st.
Never posts producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton, and the
mysterious doctor first name last name. Our senior producer
is Hans Buto. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholzer.
The show's host, that's me, is Mike Rugnetta. Not verb, but
vertigo.
Does not indicate action. Does not mean go to meet, but rather
to lie there because someone doesn't arrive. To Search by
Alejandra Pizarnik. Never Post is a production of charts and
leisure. It is distributed by Radiotopia.